Wednesday, 5 April 2017

Beating the academic paywalls

We've all got to make a living, and people are entitled to a return on their work, but there's a justified feeling that the paywalling of academic research has gone too far - not least because in many cases we're paying for it twice, once through government funding of the original research and again through the often hefty journal subscription fees of the academic publishers.

So I was interested to find, via Twitter - hat tip to Prof Diane Coyle who retweeted the original tweet from Prof Dennis Dittrich - the announcement about Unpaywall, which is an extension for Chrome which with a bit of luck will find the full text of an academic paper you're after. Totally legal: as the folks behind it say, "it’s powered by an open index of more than ten million legally-uploaded, open access resources".

At this stage it looks mostly oriented towards the physical sciences, but toujours gai - I thought I'd give it a go and see how it worked on economics journals. So I installed the extension - a doddle - and picked an article at random from the latest issue of the American Economic Review, 'Escaping the Great Recession'.

Not that I've got anything against the AER - quite the reverse, it's cheap to get at, and one of the AEA's sister publications, the always interesting Journal of Economic Perspectives, is free to all - but just as a test run of Unpaywall.

It works, for all practical purposes. It didn't storm the ramparts of the AER itself, that's not how it works, but it did find the same article on EconStor, where it had appeared as a working paper in the Fed of Chicago's series.

So at a minimum it saves you the hassle of searching by author names on the likes of EconStor or SSRN, and cuts to the chase.

Sample of one and all that, but it worked straight out of the box. Recommended.

1 comment:

Welcome to my economics blog

“The remarkable thing about economics is that once you've been exposed to the big ideas, they begin to show up everywhere … Economics offers insight into wealth, poverty, gender relations, the environment, discrimination, politics...How could that possibly not be interesting?” - Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, 2002

"The soundest argument for markets ... is simply that, very frequently, they are the least bad of the alternatives. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark on democracy, markets are the worst form of resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried" - Prof George Yarrow, Three Lectures on Privatization, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, April 1990

"And if there's one thing we've learned about flawed markets, it's that people flee from them, either physically or by resorting to back channels and black markets. Either way, flawed markets can undermine not just communities but whole nations" - Alvin Roth, Who Gets What - and Why, 2015

"More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense...Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them ifwe sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed is to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology" - Stephen Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, 2018

"Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count" - Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Economic Journal, 1898

"There is some evil genius which sits at the elbow of every economist, forcing him into all sorts of contorted and unnecessary complications" - John Maynard Keynes, letter to Roy Harrod, August 1935

"We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork" - the philosopher Didactylos, in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, 1992

"I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business" - the blogger's creed, as foreshadowed by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

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